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Monday, January 15, 2007

Why India needs school vouchers

This piece was published as an Op-Ed in today's Wall Street Journal Asia. (Subscriber link.) It started life as a 1050-word piece, and ended up around 600 words due to constraints of space, so I will have more to write on this subject by and by.

On India’s Republic Day, January 26, the New Delhi-based Centre for Civil Society will launch a campaign for school choice. It’s an apt day for the event. While India’s constitution guarantees universal and free education, the government has utterly failed that mission. It’s time to encourage the private sector to step in.

Public primary education in India is in dire straits. According to a 2006 study by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization, more than half the children who join school in the first grade drop out before reaching eighth grade. A study conducted the prior year by the same organization found that 35% of school-going children surveyed between the ages of seven to 14 failed a reading test involving a simple paragraph; 41% of them couldn’t subtract or divide properly.

Little wonder that private schools are sprouting up like wildfire to fill the gap. Often illegal, these schools don’t just serve the rich and middle classes, but the poor as well. And the quality of education these schools provide is often higher than in their public counterparts. A 1999 government report titled the “Public Report on Basic Education in India” found that private schools across rural parts of North India were vastly superior to public schools in terms of facilities and learning environment. On surprise visits during school days, the researchers found only 53% of the accredited public schools actively engaged in teaching.

The Centre for Civil Society’s campaign aims to enable more parents to send their children to private schools by promoting school vouchers. (Currently, India doesn’t boast any school voucher schemes, though a few are in the works.) Inspired by Milton Friedman, vouchers enable parents to enroll their child in a school of their choice. Variations on the idea include tuition reimbursement and direct cash transfers. In each scheme, the principle is the same: empowering parents with choice to increase competition among educational institutes and engender better quality education.

Much more could be done. Currently, India’s private sector is actively discouraged from setting up educational institutes. To offer state-approved degrees, a school must meet a number of parameters, including government-trained teachers, large playgrounds, and other onerous requirements. Above all — inanely — private schools cannot operate for a profit. Entrepreneurs evade these hurdles through innovative financial structures such as trusts, but the necessity of this kind of manipulation scares away many would-be entrepreneurs. According to a 2001 CCS study, it takes 14 different licenses from four different authorities to open a private school in New Delhi - a task that, if done legally, could take years.

India’s parents aren’t waiting for a government fix. A 2005 study by education specialists James Tooley and Pauline Dixon showed that 65% of schoolchildren in Hyderabad’s slums attend private unaided schools—for which their parents had to pay—rather than a free government alternative. In a similar finding, an October 2006 survey by CCS showed that 14% of households in Delhi earning less than 5,000 rupees ($113) per month opted to send their children to a private school.

It is a common canard that the cost of education is higher in private schools than in public schools. Numerous studies have shown that private schools use capital as much as twice as efficiently as their public sector peers. Why? When competition is absent, waste ensues. Voucher schemes, put simply, allow public money to be put to better use.

As in any society, education is the foundation of future economic success. The Centre for Civil Society’s campaign for school choice may be a nascent effort, but it’s of critical importance to the India of today — and of tomorrow.

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Further resources: Do check out Pratham's comprehensive reports, ASER 2005 and ASER 2006. Tooley and Dixon's landmark report is summarised and available in full here. Andrew Coulson's paper, How Markets Affect Quality (pdf link), is an excellent resource on the subject. You can read about the PROBE Report here, and buy it here and here. Mayank Wadhwa's CCS paper on the licenses required to start a private school in Delhi is here, and the findings of the latest CCS survey are summarised here.

My thanks to Gautam Bastian and Shruti Rajagopalan for sharing their valuable insights with me on school choice, and directing me to many useful resources. Gargantuan gratitude grunts gregariously.